Friday, 12 November 2010

Yazzer Ahlbi-Back - A memoir part 1

1972. Standing on the grass airstrip of my farm in Africa at the foot of the Ngong hills, my honest native bearer, Moma Akawimbe, knelt with the tears rolling down her good-natured black face. "Massa don't go" she begged, terrified that she would be left without my secret recipe for Spicy Ackee dumplin's.

Alas, I had to leave as I had received a proposal of marriage from the Heir to the Throne and had to tell him personally that it could never be. He was too white, too male, too everything for me to seriously consider it.

He would just have to get over my musky dusky beauty and satisfy himself with some pale neurotic shicksa (so my Jewish best friends told me). But he could never forget me.

Alas, my true love Vincent Cable was, unbeknownst to me, in the arms of my arch-rival, the twinkle-toed Olympia Rebelo. Her with her nursing qualification and PhD in Music (she played the bassoon and it was rumoured all round Kenya that she could hold her breath for three minutes) she had the insubstantial attractions which shallow white men are often overly-impressed by.

Once he saw my advanced qualifications in literature and lapped my coconut dhals I was confident there would be no more talk of all this foxtrotting and the military two-step. But first, I had to fulfil my destiny to become The Only Non-White Columnist in Britain.

Given that your writing is more observant, wittier, better argued and more elegant than hers, the real question for me is how come she's a national newspaper columnist and you aren't (unless, of course, you are, and this is just a sideline...)

Don't ask me how he managed to land a woman who was known as a beauty all across Africa and Goa (where her family is from) and who had her own glittering talents. She could have married royalty, she could have married presidents. She could have been an ambassador in her own right. Vince was doing well as an executive but he wasn't exactly James Bond.

Cable's dad was particularly dim and took against her on the basis that she was Asian, failing to realize for some years that Vince had scored well above his class.